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lipowitz

45 karma · joined June 9, 2025

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lipowitz··on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
> Also, to be pedantic, you don’t have to have citizenship of a foreign country in order to have a greater allegiance to it.

The behavior of the christian conservative cult is a bit more than a pedantic detail at this point. Why is trying to get Israel into a conflict to get Jesus to come and accelerate the end of all jews on Earth not antisemitism? I don't see wanting to use the Jew for cockfighting making it to the State Department's summary of antisemitism.

lipowitz··on Now might be the best time to learn software development
Increasing total prosperity is the wrong goal if distribution is completely unregulated. Investor and real estate owning classes like the 1% get more, the salaries can trend down because food costs are down, in a deflation spiral the youth are perpetual dependents and/or debtors who can't possibly earn enough over day to day costs given global competition includes people with no debts or debts from an economy that was less wealthy.
lipowitz··on Now might be the best time to learn software development
Removing jobs that could only be performed by those living near the particular fields with those that can be done anywhere makes jobs for the person willing to take the least satisfactory compensation for the most skill and work.

Working the summer fields was one of the least desirable jobs but still gave local students with no particular skills a good supplemental income appropriate for whichever region.

lipowitz··on Show HN: Qrkey – Offline private key backup on paper
It isn't the PDF you started with once you print it.. A QR code scanner in a camera app, etc, will return text such as a URI.
lipowitz··on RISC-V's Increasing Influence
Thank you Cassandra.. But you could.be right about all of these geopolitics and it still wouldn't change the fact that NVIDIA announced a billion RISCV chips in their GPUs so far or that China is not going to throw away its insurance policy if the US looks friendly for 4 years. I don't know what you are hoping people keep paying license fees on, but everyone from TSMC to the final consumer is going to be all the happier dividing that money up without a license whenever possible.
lipowitz··on Google Pixels are no longer the AOSP reference device
Huh? Google gives everyone in the world instructions to make derivatives of AOSP and they could install them[1] on the reference devices which were all nexus/pixel. Google said nothing until they suddenly didn't deliver for those devices.

They made related announcements in March and certainly saw interpretations of their announcement by interested AOSP derivative maintainers.

That's not remotely the same as I figured how to boot X against so and so's wishes and now it stopped working.

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/setup/test/running

lipowitz··on Google Pixels are no longer the AOSP reference device
Nothing I bought in the produce aisle today had instructions for use. Should I leave it to rot?

AOSP recipes themselves list reference devices and they could have updated this with their announcement in March if they didn't want external developers procuring these things as bricks for their gardens. GrapheneOS is just a community of a AOSP derivative there are any number of AOSP derived things people may have been doing with these devices.

lipowitz··on AOSP project is coming to an end
It takes a lot of work for them to push google apps into its own permissions system etc, but its not like you feel that as a user..

Its similar to what the Linux distributions that try to turn on a SeLinux like profile by default would feel like if they really put in the work. That's nothing like switching (from a Linux) to a BSD.

(I would love to just run my desktop Linux with a half baked touch UI and rely on browser versions of almost everything, but that would feel like a real switch between OSes instead of just seeing the same OS with a corrected security profile as the user. I also don't see why you compare it to an Abrams, I doubt an Abrams has a security model intentionally compromised by an ad company, GrapheneOS just makes it possible to catch the dumbest or laziest attacks on a system no one should run ever.)

lipowitz··on A receipt printer cured my procrastination
It's a very interesting solution. I've been thinking more about filling my online time sheet system in advance but I suspect its too impractical to stick to times or keep readjusting with interruptions, so maybe I will try post-its.

I notice a bit of a link in behaviors between people I know who have ADHD and/or OCD. I'm not really sure what someone who "gives-in" to OCD impulses would feel as side effects, etc.. But I'm kind of curious if you see a downside to having followed loops for their reinforcing effects over days of work, etc?

lipowitz··on My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use
How do you get all the bloatware off and de-metric your Windows? With Apple it is one criminal instead of an oligarchy of crime.
lipowitz··on AOSP project is coming to an end
I don't see what OpenBSD has to do with it. Is this like liking reliability in a car meaning you are a Toyota fan?

I've had no trouble with banks, brokers or payment networks on GrapheneOS but I don't use crap like company-X pay wallets..

lipowitz··on AOSP project is coming to an end
They've raised the prices so one is looking at a 1 year old a-series to pay $300. Meanwhile they are even further behind the curve hardware wise.

It would be very nice (but a tremendous effort) if Graphene OS took this opportunity to switch hardware preference right before Google's August release. Maybe to someone who could make a modern tablet too.

lipowitz··on AOSP project is coming to an end
This is more an opportunity for the EU to suddenly play harder ball than expected.
lipowitz··on The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela
Their ads are very convincing, I'd pay up to 40¢ a month for Gemini to tell me how to recover with a recipe for tomato sauce I accidentally put sugar in, though only in months where I inexplicably add sugar to things.
lipowitz··on Researchers discover evidence in the mystery of America's 'Lost Colony'
If Croatoan ceremonies didn't involve cremation it could be quite a bit easier.. I don't really see the article's evidence as very compelling. Many things may have been collected from the site and ultimately discarded in the trash heaps without the proposed integration.
lipowitz··on It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)
A BSer is about pushing for things that don't make sense but sound like they solve more constraints than anything possible to implement could. It is very unlikely they are giving you code that could compile. (Though if so there's a little bug or todo in it that just happens to be Turing award's material.)
lipowitz··on It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)
On a code level I'm inclined to agree that it will do better line-by-line.

On more abstract things I think it has to have intentional filters to not follow you down a rathole like flat earth doctrine if you match the bulk of opinion in verbose authors in a subject. I don't see the priority for adding those filters being recognized on apolitical STEM oriented topics.

lipowitz··on Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
The next billion didn't live in London. (These companies didn't want to butcher their high price per user market for volume and BB was not much of the market a year or two later. Firefox OS existed from around when Android had 80% share with most of that being at least one version behind.. I was rather obsessed with the limits of the 3rd quartile mobile browser in 2014..)
lipowitz··on Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
The next billion users for each billion after the first were not enterprise workers who wanted to connect to some email server so windows and BlackBerry missed the volume market entirely. Users wanted a phone that lasted 3 years, could browse and could bank. A small number of power developers that dont despise the platform are simply needed to keep the user base at all and a browser OS that wasn't Android had that by default.

Mozilla ignored the autonomy of the parties that should be in an ecosystem and tried to make them wait for Mozilla's choices and implementations on things. I bet they had more than enough people on every one of their waiting lists for being involved but they discouraged actual involvement.

lipowitz··on Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.

If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.

lipowitz··on It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)
I've seen this cycle play out quite a few times long before LLMs. What scares me this time is the wide ranging possible consequences of the automatic assistant in terms of how far they can lead us down the garden path and how hard people are pushed to become BSers.
lipowitz··on Why Koreans ask what year you were born
Earlier everything was based on 'handles' and using them was fine and expected.. As networks adopt everyone and become used for formal things it's gotten more complicated to integrate rules of different systems.

I've started to prefer messages that just start with "Hello,".

lipowitz··on 'Humans need solitude': How being alone can make you happier
I think it is very hard to get unbiased research on procreation related topics because people not only try to justify their own life or (conflicting?) desires for their life but what they want their children to do, etc, which is also not just about one topic like grandchildren, it is also about social standing through anticipated judgement of others.

Musk for example seems to be on the edge of having sabotaged everything he worked for over indirect ways to gerrymander society and try to control just one of his children's lifestyles and/or distance himself from approval of it. Warren Buffet's relationship with money/work philosophy and grandchildren is perhaps even more interesting though a less dramatic demonstration of the power of procreation related topics over people.

lipowitz··on Tesla AI VP Milan Kovac Resigns After 9 Years Leading FSD and Optimus Projects
Maybe you should stop focusing on winning the hours worked competition and focus on finding a new job.
lipowitz··on The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela
Google thinks it is going to charge a monthly fee for Gemini so they are basically correcting their model to be user paid in the switch from search to LLM.

They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc, somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that they have lower costs per user.

I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want to pay them for each platform they use which is why they all tend to do so many questionable integration attempts to try to get users to not want to use a separate LLM of their choice in a browser instead.

lipowitz··on Ask HN: What was your path toward expat?
This doesn't make much sense to me.. A company generally doesn't want an employee who is going to go to grad school in 18 months unless there is a lot of invested value or connection. Are US companies interested in talking to you after you state this goal?
lipowitz··on Meta Is Creating a New A.I. Lab to Pursue 'Superintelligence'
"It can't be any worse than what we have done so far" is a very logical sentiment. The trouble is that they never fully reset the elements that are truly bringing them down while they do reset the elements that are functioning properly because they are mostly outside of management's awareness.
lipowitz··on Tesla's Head of Optimus Humanoid Robot Program Exits Company
Timed for when Musk has to be on his best behavior and show gratitude or something else?
lipowitz··on Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests
The US is obsessed with precedence so doing something correctly once would ruin their exemption.
lipowitz··on Why We're Moving on from Nix
I think that's kind of sad. There are a lot of good technologies that require some investment to understand them and a lot of worse is better approaches that end in a mayhem that is ultimately a terrible work environment.

For a while it seemed like investment would win but now I think we will have massive tombs of poorly written stuff that can only be worked around with even more LLM generated solutions. It is like the software bloat problem we've had recently but on steroids.

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